Daphne’s Tree: Laurel from the Riverbank to Delphi

Walk down any shaded ravine in mainland Greece where a spring comes out of the rock, and sooner or later you will brush past laurel. It is easy to recognize: dark, leathery, glossy leaves that smell sharp and clean when crushed, small creamy flowers in early spring, black berries in autumn. Village cooks drop a leaf into lentil soup and slow stews, and churches scatter it at Easter. The Greeks called the tree daphnē. Their myths said it had once been a girl.

Ovid’s chase

The version everyone knows comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, finished around 8 CE. Apollo, flushed with pride after killing the monstrous serpent Python, sees young Cupid stringing a bow and mocks him: leave archery to grown-ups. Cupid answers with two arrows. A golden one strikes Apollo and fills him with desire; a blunt one tipped with lead strikes Daphne, daughter of the river god Peneus, and makes her flee the very idea of a lover. She already wanted to roam the woods unmarried, like Diana.

Apollo chases her, calling out his titles as he runs, as if a list of credentials might make her stop: lord of Delphi, son of Jupiter, discoverer of medicine. She runs faster. When she is spent and he is close enough to breathe on her hair, she reaches the banks of her father’s river and prays to lose the beauty that has brought this on her. Her limbs grow heavy. Thin bark closes over her breast, her hair turns to leaves, her arms to branches, her quick feet to roots.

Even so, Phoebus loved her. Laying his hand on the trunk, he felt her heart still trembling beneath the new bark; he held the branches as if they were her arms and kissed the wood, and the wood shrank from his kisses.

Ovid, Metamorphoses (our rendering)

Apollo makes the best of it. If she cannot be his wife, she will be his tree. Her leaves will crown his hair, his lyre and his quiver; she will stand guard at the doorposts of Rome’s rulers and ride with generals in their triumphs; and like his own uncut hair, her foliage will stay green forever. The laurel, Ovid says, seemed to nod its new branches in agreement, though readers have argued ever since about whether that nod was consent or only the wind.

Other rivers, other fathers

Ovid sets the story in Thessaly, on the Peneus, the river that cuts through the narrow Vale of Tempe between Mount Olympus and Mount Ossa. Other Greeks told it elsewhere. Pausanias, travelling through Arcadia, heard that Daphne was the daughter of the river Ladon, and he records a different plot. A young man named Leucippus loved her, let his hair grow long, dressed as a girl and joined her company of huntresses. Apollo, jealous, put it into the girls’ minds to bathe in the river; Leucippus hung back, was stripped and found out, and the huntresses killed him with their spears. The poet Parthenius tells a similar tale but makes Daphne the daughter of Amyclas, a king in Laconia. The Latin handbook of Hyginus gives the short version, with the Peneus.

These variants matter to anyone who cares about landscape. Laurel loves water. It grows thickest along stream banks and in damp gorges, and both Tempe and the Ladon valley are exactly the kind of places where it flourishes. Whoever first told the story was looking at a real riverbank. Arcadia offered another nymph turned into a plant on the same river Ladon: Syrinx, who became the reeds of Pan’s pipes.

Delphi’s tree

At Apollo’s sanctuary of Delphi, laurel was everywhere. Pausanias passes on a tradition that the very first temple there was a hut built of laurel boughs brought from Tempe, followed by temples of beeswax and feathers, then of bronze, and finally of stone. The tie to Tempe ran deep. Every eighth year Delphi staged the Septerion, a festival recalling Apollo’s fight with the Python, and, as Plutarch and Aelian describe it, a boy was afterward sent north to Tempe, where the god had gone to be purified, and brought back laurel cut there.

The winners of the Pythian Games at Delphi were crowned with laurel, and Pausanias gives the reason plainly: Apollo had loved the daughter of Ladon. Each of the great games had its own plant. Olympia crowned its victors with wild olive, Nemea with wild celery, the Isthmus with pine. An olive grower may be forgiven a little pride that the oldest and grandest of the four chose our tree, but no crown was bound to its god as closely as Delphi’s laurel was to Apollo.

At Thebes, Pausanias adds, a boy of good family served for a year as priest of Apollo with the title daphnēphoros, laurel-bearer. A later description of the procession has a pole of olive wood dressed in laurel and flowers, carried through the town. Even there, olive and laurel went together.

Laurel in village hands

Laurel has never lost its place in Greek life. It grows beside chapels and monasteries, and the monastery of Daphni, on the Sacred Way that initiates once walked from Athens to Eleusis, takes its name from the tree and is thought to stand near the site of an ancient sanctuary of Apollo. On Palm Sunday many Greek churches hand out sprigs of bay along with the palm crosses, and on the morning of Holy Saturday priests in many parishes scatter bay leaves across the church floor as a sign of victory over death, so that worshippers walk home with the scent on their shoes.

None of this means that Daphne was remembered by name in the villages. What lasted was the plant’s character: evergreen, aromatic, a little bitter, growing where there is water and shade. The ancients saw in it a girl who refused to be caught and a god who could not let go, and they turned her leaves into the highest honour Apollo could give. The tree itself, by the spring below the chapel, goes on keeping its leaves through every season, just as Ovid’s Apollo promised.